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A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

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Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#421

Post by rhino369 »

takno wrote: post #411
rhino369 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money is actually spent on the costs of administration that would actually be eliminated by UBI, which is mostly just qualification paperwork? You'd still need fraud prevention--people faking identities. You'd still paper pushers who coordinate payments and customer service. I can't believe this really would create all that much savings when averaged out over 330 million people.

Ignoring the government's costs, people on welfare in the UK can easily end up spending 20 hours a week on claiming that welfare, spread between having to transport themselves to attend a weekly signing on session, making a set number of job applications that meet the criteria (at the same time as conducting a real job search), attending worthless courses and filling out the paperwork. If you remove the moral judgeme…

That's not really a cost to society. It's a cost of time from those who have plenty of time to spend.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#422

Post by fucking_tragedy »

PietdeVries wrote: post #357
goda90 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about children are included, then provide X% to parents for child care expenses, and X% to a fund that the child can't access until 18. That way we don't have to do free higher education. Public universities can expect each student to have close to XXXXX dollars saved away and set tuition accordingly.

Hmm... So with everyone getting free money, including the children, there is no need for a father to take care of the family when he decides to diforce, right? Afterall, the family gets a good deal of income even when daddy is gone. So marriage will no longer be a bond forever, it will be a bond until something nicer comes along since there is no financial penalty anymore: no pressure to stay together for the kids. M…

Having economic shackles as the only incentive to keep two unhappy people together for longer than necessary seems like a terrible environment in which to raise happy and healthy children. Having experienced that as a child, it was miserable and set me up with unhealthy ideas about relationships.

Might as well make divorce illegal again. After all, something nicer might come along.

If the only thing holding your marriage together is needing to pay the bills or a judge, being forced to stay together only serves to make people like you feel righteous.

Your comment makes me wonder about what other unhealthy ideas about relationships you want to force upon others. Perhaps you should spend less time on r/MRAs and r/TheRedPill.

> So with everyone getting free money, including the children, there is no need for a father to take care of the family when he decides to diforce, right?

Having to pay child care costs and alimony above the poverty line are things that exist now and will have reason to exist even if a BI is implemented.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#423

Post by TheCoelacanth »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #157
rmc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher wages for dirty jobs would certainly spur innovation in labour saving devices to reduce the amount of manual labour. "Dirty" jobs being paid more certainly does sound a little more ethical than today, where those with little options have to work those dirty jobs to keep their house and to eat, and they are paid low.

How would it spur innovation? After enacting a BI, we've just reduced the labor supply and funneled resources toward consumption (since rich people invest, poor people consume, and we've shifted resources from rich to poor). Labor supply = Labor servicing consumption + labor servicing investment Rearranging this implies: Labor providing investment = labor supplied - labor providing consumption Simple arithmetic shows…

More money for consumers -> more money that can be earned by businesses -> more incentive to come up with innovative things for people to spend money on

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#424

Post by morgante »

mcv wrote: post #130

Interesting how this article spins Basic Income as something of particular interest to conservatives while liberals would object to it. I suppose that can help sell the concept to highly partisan anti-liberals, but I know plenty of liberals and progressives who strongly support Basic Income. The idea that the people employed in the bureaucracy managing the current mess of programs losing their job is a silly concern.…

It's not disingenuous though. In my personal experience, many liberals do in fact oppose basic income.

Don't forget that public sector unions (ie. the people administering all the existing entitlement programs) are a major liberal constituency.

> I would like Basic Income to be a bit more than $10,000 per year, though. Ideally, especially when the number of jobs available falls due to increased automation, I'd like the Basic Income to provide a comfortable income.

There are plenty of places in the country where $10k is more than enough to live on. One of the biggest benefits of UBI would be that we can start moving more people to the massive areas of our country where there's low COL and few jobs.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#425

Post by [deleted] »

throwanem wrote: post #391
brightball wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make it work you'd have to take whatever the amount is and extract it from all other government benefit programs. You get $700 / month from the government for basic income. Your social security, welfare, unemployment, disability, etc is reduced by $700 / month. Reducing all of those programs by the first $700 would effectively gut each of them enough to finally make some reforms without inducing panic in everyone…

> You get $700 / month from the government for basic income. I thought the idea was that it be enough to live on.

[deleted]

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#426

Post by CajunAlexTrebec »

astral303 wrote: post #237
jackreichert wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it fair to say they're being paid if they paid into the system paying them for their entire working lives? Can someone please explain why people call Social Security an entitlement? Am I missing something?

It's language war. Entitlement spending is a great way to negatively frame social security.

To be clear, the money I'm paying into Social Security today is being consumed by current Social Security recipients.

It is not being set aside for me to use when I theoretically begin to draw Social Security in the future.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#427

Post by Unklejoe »

morgante wrote: post #393
Unklejoe wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool idea. I'd advocate for an age of 25 though. An 18 year old these days is still a child. Give them a couple years into the drinking age to get their bad decisions out of the way.

That's offensive. I am 23 and have lived away from home since I was 17. I've been financially independent since I turned 18. Don't stereotype.

That's quite the accomplishment, and is by far not the norm. I am 25 and have only been financially independent since 23, and even I am the anomaly amongst my peers.

I don't see what's wrong with my stereotype in this case. Most people under 25 are not financially independent, and it's mainly due to the society we live in, not the children themselves.

When my Dad was growing up, people had full time jobs at 16 years old and were married with kids by 25, where as today, the average person doesn't even graduate college before 23.

I'm not blaming the children for that.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#428

Post by morgante »

notahacker wrote: post #272
lsaferite wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"universal benefit program" meaning it is designed from the beginning to replace the 14, so now you have 1.

Designed to /= actually will There are plenty of campaigners on the left - the UK Green Party is an example - that openly campaign for a BI in addition to most of the state benefits that already exist. And when it comes to implementation details, it's quite hard to believe that many left wing proponents actually would take the "well if the BI isn't enough for you to afford your social housing once we sell it off, may…

Any bill to introduce UBI would almost certainly have to include the elimination of existing programs to get passed.

I don't dispute that many liberals would like to have UBI and the existing benefits (despite that being economically crippling). They're just extremely unlikely to get their way.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#429

Post by chongli »

dilemma wrote: post #375
howeyc wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's about having enough to live in the USA. Not about having enough to live where you want at your special snowflake standard of living. Yes, you may only get enough to live awesome in "the middle of nowhere" or whatever. So what? If you want to live in San Fran, find a way to get the money to live there.

So under UBI, if someone in San Francisco, NYC, DC, Seattle, etc. loses their job, they should move to rural Wisconsin?

Yes. Why not? When they do, it'll cause rent to drop in San Fran, NYC, DC and Seattle. The US has a staggering amount of available land. The problem with real estate is that prices are high where the jobs are located. With basic income you no longer have to live where the jobs are and can move around freely.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#430

Post by DominikR »

mcv wrote: post #145
weddpros wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't see any moral justification for a software engineer earning more than someone collecting waste" That's because moral justification isn't at the center of our society. The market is. Many attempts have been made to switch from the market to something else, not many were brilliant. The "lucky historical accident" you cite isn't one... It's just the way our society was built. Also you could argue on many differ…

The labour market is not going away with BI. It will just become more free. Currently, many workers are forced to accept crappy jobs for little pay because the alternative is starvation. With BI, they can afford to say no when they don't think the compensation is worth it. If those crappy jobs are necessary, they will have to improve, either by making the jobs more fun or interesting, or increasing the pay.

If you subsidise people so they don't need to accept "crappy jobs" then it distorts the market instead of making it more "free" because now a potential worker with fewer skills valued by the market doesn't need to make his living by taking a job that is adequate for his level of education/skills.

> If those crappy jobs are necessary, they will have to improve, either by making the jobs more fun or interesting, or increasing the pay.

You make this sound as if an employer simply can raise the pay of his employees without taking into account the realities of the market.

Some services or products are worth less precisely because there is no customer available willing to pay more for it.

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